0000000001163482
AUTHOR
Fernando T. Maestre
Impact of land use, pesticide application and agricultural management practices on the phosphorus foraging capacity of mycorrhizal fungi in 217 european agricultural soils
More than 80% of vascular plants form symbiotic associations with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). Several studies have shown the potential of AMF to provide plants with phosphorus (P) via their hyphal network. Most of these studies have been performed in the greenhouse under controlled conditions using standardized soil mixtures. However, few studies have investigated hyphal P transfer in natural soils, severely limiting our understanding of the main drivers of P transfer by AMF in real agricultural soils. As a consequence, the potential of using AMF as a tool to increase crop yield remains a mystery. Using agricultural soils from a large field observation study in Europe, we aimed at a…
Symbiotic status alters fungal eco‐evolutionary offspring trajectories
Despite host-fungal symbiotic interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems, understanding how symbiosis has shaped the ecology and evolution of fungal spores that are involved in dispersal and colonization of their hosts has been ignored in life-history studies. We assembled a spore morphology database covering over 26,000 species of free-living to symbiotic fungi of plants, insects and humans and found more than eight orders of variation in spore size. Evolutionary transitions in symbiotic status correlated with shifts in spore size, but the strength of this effect varied widely among phyla. Symbiotic status explained more variation than climatic variables in the current distribution of…